CHAPTER 11
Sloane
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I knew the time because I'd been watching the green numbers on the loft microwave count down my own pulse, and then they were gone, and the dark came in like water finding a crack.
The fans stopped. The space heaters ticked once, twice, and quit.
And the cold, which had been crouching outside the steel skin of the hangar all night, walked straight in through the off switch.
Within ten minutes I could see my own breath.
I lay in the bunk with the one wool blanket pulled to my chin and ran the math, because running the math is what I do instead of feeling things.
Julian had said the fuel would last until dawn if they rationed it.
Julian had been generous, the way controlled men are generous, hedging against the moment they're proven wrong.
The hangar held maybe sixty degrees of borrowed warmth and it was bleeding out through the trusses by the minute, and somewhere across the bike floor Hollis was snoring and Cady was curled around the sat phone like it was a hot brick, and I was alone in a bunk in a building that the storm had turned into a refrigerator.
Only one warm body in a freezing hangar, I thought, and hated how the thought arrived already shaped, already wanting.
I heard him before I saw him, and because Grant only makes footsteps when he wants you to have them, what reached me was that low thing he does under his breath, the growl that lives below hearing, the one I'd felt in my sternum in the parking structure days ago when I still thought I could lawyer my way out of dying.
It came across the dark like a tuning fork struck against my ribs.
"You're shaking," he said.
"It's thirty-eight degrees, Holloway. It's a medical response, not a confession."
"It's going to forty. " A pause shaped like him counting exits. "Then the thirties. The generator's finished, Hollis already tried it, and there's nothing left to ration."
I sat up. The cold bit my shoulders. Above the bunks, through the high window in the truss-line, the runway light string burned its single amber line across the black, the only warm color for miles, throwing a thin gold seam down the wall.
It caught the silver at his temples. It caught the flat gray of his eyes, pupils already wide, the wolf close to the surface the way it always was when he'd decided something he didn't like.
"I'm not going to watch you go hypothermic out of principle," he said. "You run cold and I run hot, and that isn't a feeling I'm dressing up for you, it's thermodynamics."
He's making it a calculation because he knows I only sign calculations. I should have been insulted. I was, instead, undone by being read that accurately.
"You run hot," I repeated.
"My kind always burns hotter than yours, a furnace where you've got a hearth. " His jaw worked. "Call it necessity. Borrowed body heat, nothing more required of either of us."
He was already lying, and the lie sat right there in that easy word nothing.
"Get in," I said. "Nobody's deposing you under this blanket. We can skip the part where you pretend it's only math."
For a man built to react in fractions of a second, he moved slowly.
He set something on the crate beside the bunk first, deliberate, where I could see it: the brass round.
The spent.308 he thumbs raw, the one meant for him.
He set down his talisman the way you set down a weapon when you mean to use your hands for something else.
Then he slid under the blanket behind me and the heat of him hit my back like a door swung open on a forge, warmer than any human body had a right to be, and under it the smell of gun oil and cedar, and I made a sound I will deny to my grave.
"There," he said roughly, against my hair. "Better."
"Don't sound so smug about being warm-blooded."
"I'm not smug. I'm scared. " He said it flat and finished, the way he says everything that's true.
"I've got my hands on you and I'm thinking about exits and I'm thinking I could break you without trying.
So we're going to do this slow, and you're going to talk to me the whole time, because if you go quiet I'll think I hurt you and I'll never touch you again. "
The honesty of it went through me worse than the cold had.
I turned over. It put us nose to nose in the thin gold light, his breath and mine fogging together in the space between, a small fragile cloud that the runway string turned amber, the only warm thing we'd managed to make in this whole frozen building.
I watched it rise. I watched it disappear into the dark above the bunk and I thought, with the part of my brain that never stops drafting, that's us, that's the whole thing, two warm exhales in a cold place, and we keep making it anyway.
"I meant it," I said. "The kiss. You wanted me to mean it. I do."
His control made a sound when it broke, quiet, just a hitch in the growl beneath his breathing, a stutter in the engine.
He kissed me and it was the cold room again except this time nobody walked out, this time it deepened and turned and his hand came up to cradle the back of my skull so carefully, so deliberately careful, like he was holding something that had broken once and been pinned back together.
He knows about the clavicle, I thought wildly. Of course he knows. He read me the way he reads a room. His thumb found the old surgical scar at my collarbone through my shirt and rested there, gentle as an apology.
"Tell me yes," he said against my mouth. "Out loud. I need it out loud."
"Yes."
"Tell me you know what you're saying yes to."
"You, Holloway. In a bunk. In a blizzard. With your terrible bedside manner. " My voice cracked on the last word and ruined the joke. "Yes. On the record. Yes."
Something in him let go an inch. He pulled my shirt up and over and the cold hit my skin and then his mouth was on my throat, on my collarbone, careful around the scar like it was a border he wouldn't cross without permission, and lower, and his hands were so deliberate it made me ache, both palms spanning my ribs, his grip a fraction of what it could be and trembling with the effort of staying there.
He took a nipple in his mouth and the growl came back, into my skin this time, and I felt it everywhere, in my teeth, between my thighs.
"Cold," I gasped, "I'm freezing, do something about it."
"That's the only good thing about this storm. " He dragged the blanket up over both of us, sealed us into the banked, radiant heat of him, his skin scalding against every cold inch of me. "Now I get to be the warm thing. Stay with me. You with me?"
"I'm with you. Touch me before I file a complaint."
He laughed, low and shocked, like he hadn't expected to laugh in bed ever again, and then his hand went between my thighs and I stopped having opinions about anything.
He found me slick already, embarrassingly, four days of forced proximity and one cold-room kiss having done their patient work, and he made a wrecked sound at that, at how ready I was, his fingers circling my clit with that same terrible control, learning me, two fingers sliding into me slow and then curling, and I heard myself say his name, and it wasn't Holloway this time. It was the one underneath.
"Grant."
His forehead dropped to mine. Our breath fogged again between us, faster now, two clouds tangling, gold-lit. "Say that again."
"Grant. Grant, I need more, I'm not made of glass, the clavicle was twenty years ago, I survived sledding, I'll survive you."
"That's not funny. " His voice had gone to gravel.
"It's a little funny."
He pushed his sweatpants down and I felt the length of him against my hip, hot, hard, the head of his cock already wet, and there was something else there too, a heat and a pressure radiating off him that wasn't quite human, a kind of swollen want at the base of him that I didn't have a word for and that he clearly did, because he went very still.
"There's a thing," he said carefully, "that happens.
To us. When it gets close. A pressure. A wanting to.
I won't. It's not for tonight and maybe not ever and you'd choose it or you wouldn't, it's a whole conversation with paperwork attached, knowing you.
Tonight it's just want. Tonight I just need to be inside you. Color?"
"Green," I said, and then, because he was still holding himself off me like a man holding a door against a flood, "Grant. Green. I want you inside me. That's a verbal consent, that's on the record, that's notarized. Move."
He notched against me and pushed in and I felt every inch of it, the stretch, the heat, the careful relentless slowness of a man who would rather die than hurt me, and when he was fully seated he stopped and shuddered and pressed his face into my neck and breathed like he was the one in danger.
"You okay," he said. "Tell me. Words."
"I'm better than okay. Move, Holloway, this is the worst-paced thing I've ever been a party to."
He moved. And it was good, it was so good it scared me, the drag and fill of him, the heat, the way he kept his weight on his forearms so as not to crush me, the way he watched my face for any flicker that meant stop.
He was controlling all of it, every thrust measured, every ounce of his strength rationed like the fuel that ran out, and he was being careful with me, beautifully, terribly careful, and the carefulness was a kind of distance, and I will not be held at a distance.
I refuse. It's a character flaw. My grandmother had it too.
So I did the thing I do. I changed the terms of the deal.
I planted a hand on his chest and pushed, and because he would let me move a planet before he'd ever resist me, he rolled, and then I was on top of him, straddling him, sinking back down onto his cock, taking him at my own depth, my own pace, my own pace, and I watched the exact moment it undid him.